Proposition 8

I was on my way to Trader Joe's when two girls with arms slung around each others' shoulders said, "Happy Pride baby," as they passed. I responded with a big ole, "You TOO!"

I bought my groceries, walked back out onto Santa Monica Blvd and into the oncoming traffic of Dykemarch. Standing on the sidewalk with my bag of microwaveable Indian food, tofu cream cheese and wine, I smiled like an idiot to the girls and boys in the street while a guy on my left shouted "POWER TO THE V! POWER TO THE V!" V being vagina. I thought of the world's best impromptu road trip to San Francisco Pride with Halle in 1997 and a notable runner-up, driving from San Francisco to LA with Sara in 2001.

Sara and I stayed one night in a San Luis Obispo youth hostel. All I remember from the hostel was a French woman with a wandering eye AND coming home so drunk that Sara spent some time laughing on her hands and knees in the garden. Sara claimed later that she was praying and she might have been, but that's not how she got down there in the first place.

We had come from a dance club where Sara befriended someone we named Poet Shirt for his flowing blouse. It billowed around him on the dance floor, a happy mambo cloud. Sara was impressed by Poet Shirt's professional dance shoes and claimed afterward a sudden need for her own professional dance shoes. Sara and Poet Shirt danced and Sara and I danced and we were having fun, making each other laugh, when a woman (possibly the French woman with the wandering eye, I honestly can't remember) told us that it was so refreshing to see young women behaving the way we were, that most girls today are so LASCIVIOUS.

And believe me when I tell you that the only thing lascivious was the way that she pronounced LA-SCIV-I-OOOUS, dripping with the dictionary definition: x-rated, carnal, suggestive, wanton.

She seemed to assume that we were a romantic couple who, thankfully in her eyes, were not simulating sex on the dance floor. In fact, we weren't a couple unless you count a couple of straight girls who like dancing but more importantly WHO CARES. And that's what I thought of on the sidelines of Dykemarch through West Hollywood. Who cares??? If someone really, truly feels like they need to be married then they really, truly should be able to do so. Who cares who they do it with?